


Whatever They Give You, Stop Drinking It Down

by DiscoCritic



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Vomiting, and it gets to be too much, but everything is taking a toll on him, but you can read it as a romance if you squint, ghoul just wants him to get better, party is angry and sad and he needs a better way to deal with this, the funpoison was written platonically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 19:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18901027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscoCritic/pseuds/DiscoCritic
Summary: party poison has a problem. fun ghoul just wants him to get better.





	Whatever They Give You, Stop Drinking It Down

**Author's Note:**

> warning for alcoholism/alcohol abuse, mentions of suicide, and vomiting.

"Poison?"

Fun Ghoul’s looked for an hour before finding him here.

Here, of all places, here in this abandoned, rotting shed a good three hundred yards from the cluster of warehouses they’d initially parked by.

"Leave m’ alone, Ghoul."

His voice is gravelly, jagged around the edges, and Ghoul instantly knows he's been drinking again.

He can tell by the way he’s talking, trying a little too hard to sound sober. He’s caught him like this too many times to not pick up on it.

Ghoul creeps in anyway, slinking through the doorway like a cowardly shadow, and comes to a halt a few feet away. Party Poison sits hunched over on a thick stack of bricks, fifty shades of tiredness darkening his face like blots of ink. His eyes are red. There's a glass bottle in his hand, cheap liquor he must've gotten from the stash in the back of the trans-am that he thinks no one knows about.

(They know.)

"You okay?"

"Fine, Ghoul. ‘M perfectly fuckin’ _fine._ Why wouldn't I be." He leans his head back and takes a swig, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Ghoul spots other bottles, empty ones, hastily shoved halfway out of sight behind a pile of lumber.

He doesn't count how many there are. He doesn't really want to know.

"Give up the act, man. You can't just… Poison, you can't just do this every time something goes wrong." Ghoul settles down next to him on what he assumes is an upside-down painter’s bucket. The plastic creaks loudly underneath his weight but it holds.

Poison looks in his direction, turning his head ridiculously slow to get across his annoyance. Or maybe it’s so he doesn’t get dizzy. Ghoul never knows. "Wha' d'ya _want_ , Ghoul? 'Cause if you don't need anythin', you can go 'head 'n leave."

"I _want_ you to stop doing this to yourself.” Ghoul sighs and lays a hand on his friend’s shoulder, tucking a piece of crimson hair behind his ear. It’s come out of the messy bun Poison shoved it in earlier that morning. "It's not your fault the caravan got attacked. There's no way you could've known there was gonna be a raid in the middle of it."

"Thirty-two people," Poison slurs back, staring at but not really seeing him. "Thirty-two, an' they all got ghosted 'cause 'a me."

"Poison, I swear it's not your fault."

Party Poison stands up, shrugging off Ghoul's touch. He lets the empty bottle slip out of his hand and onto the ground, where it shatters into a million crystals on the floor in a way that reflects the dying evening light. "You don't know... you don’t know what I know."

Ghoul sighs. When Poison gets like this, gets drunk and works himself up into a frenzy, all kinds of things come pouring out of his mouth. "Whatever. Please, come back to the car with me now, okay?"

The redhead flaps his hands around in a vague gesture, stumbling toward the one window in this dilapidated shed that's not boarded up yet. He rests his elbows on the sill and looks out into the bleak desert landscape. "No, the Witch told me,” he insists. "I dreamed her las' week, and she said to watch ou' about this. She told me an’ I didn't listen to her!"

"How much have you had to drink?"

He ignores the question and keeps rambling. "' _S_ my fault, 'cause I knew what was goin' to happen and I didn't do anything. I'm not good at this fuckin'... hero shit. Can't even save myself from gettin' drunk. I'm not good for nothin’ and the Witch knew it. She taunted me, tha’s what happened. And I… I didn't… I couldn't get…" His sentence runs out, his brain and tongue unable to form any more words, and he looks at Ghoul wildly.

"You need to lay down, Poise. C'mon." Ghoul takes him by the forearm and tries to lead him out of the shelter, but Poison's feet are glued to the spot he's in now.

“No, I-I killed them by…”

“You didn’t kill anyone. The dracs did. You had nothing to do with it.”

"You’re wrong. Ghoulie, I can't... can't do anythin' righ' anymore. What if I just d-died—wha' 'f I jus'—" And then he forms a gun shape with his pointer and middle fingers, pushes the two against his head and stares at the wall with unfocused eyes. "So then I w'dn't mess up again. S' people wouldn't die anymore."

Ghoul makes a horrified noise somewhere in the back of his throat, tries to tug his hand down. "Poison, don't say that. You're drunk. You don't know what's going on."

"No, 'm—" He lurches forward and Ghoul has to catch him. He's the only thing holding him up now, an arm around his neck and a hand on his back to brace him.

"We're going.”

“No… It’s m’ faul’...”

He’s not leading him so much as carrying him at this point. Poison keeps talking, some shit about seeing visions at night and talking to ghosts, but Ghoul can’t understand half of what he’s saying; his speech is so slurred it’s practically incoherent at this point.

They make it halfway across the long stretch of sand back to the car before Party Poison retches and pukes all over the ground. Some of it splatters onto Ghoul’s boots and he cringes.

But he just holds his hair back for him, rubs his back and murmurs softly as the redhead empties his stomach until he’s only dry-heaving.

When Poison is done, Ghoul tugs the oily cloth he uses to wipe his raygun with from out his back pocket and cleans him up. His t-shirt’s a raggedy gray thing they found in a dumpster weeks before, and it was nearing the end of its life before he got vomit on it anyway. He balls it up and tosses it behind them without looking.

“‘M sorry,” Poison mumbles, staggering against Ghoul’s shoulder. “I tol’ you…”

“Shh. Here.” He takes one of his layers off—he has three others on underneath—to replace the soiled one with. It’s a little snug, but there’s no other options and Poison's too wasted to care anyway. “It’s okay, man. It’s okay.”

But it’s really not okay. It’s really not okay that Poison does this every single time a mission goes badly. It’s really not okay that he's trying to deal with this alone.  _It’s not o-fucking-kay_ that this is Poison's way to cope, because at this point, the great, unstoppable Party Poison is virtually destroying himself.

And Ghoul doesn’t want that to happen.

But he keeps his mouth shut, and helps Poison to the car, and gets him inside, and picks up the radio, and calls Jet and Kobra to say he’s found him, and looks back over to find that he’s passed out with his head in Ghoul’s lap.

And even though he knows he should say something about it later when Poison's sober, about how the bad thoughts that come with the drinking—or even the drinking itself—could become his untimely demise, Ghoul also knows that neither of them are going to bring this up again.

And they don’t.

**Author's Note:**

> “i don’t believe whatever this is/whatever they give you, stop drinking it down” and “i hear voices/i see visions/these spirits are my prison” - absinthe by i don’t know how but they found me
> 
> song requested anonymously on tumblr.  
> follow me @discocritic!


End file.
